The first book I wanted to be sure and read was W. E. B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays and sociological studies he wrote at the turning of the 20th Century. I would be visiting the home in which he lived when he died and his adjoining tomb, in Accra, Ghana.
Biographically speaking it is interesting to note that he attended the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, during his childhood. Dr. DuBois was the first African American graduate of Harvard University (B.A. cum laude, 1890; M.A., 1891; Ph.D., 1895). His expertise was in government and history, but his sociological examination of the condition of African Americans brought America news of the gulf between Black and White.
In 1903, the date of publication, the United States as a country was 38 years out of the Civil War and 40 years under the Emancipation Proclamation. The Souls of Black Folk would identify in no uncertain terms the gross inequities of systems in the United States and the inequalities of its citizens. Seven years had been spent at Reconstruction. Now, Jim Crow was gaining ground. The slavery system had been replaced in the South with a system of what would become known as sharecropping. Dr. DuBois was able in this book, through statistics and individual testimonies, to present the ways in which Black tenant farmers were driven gradually into debt and obligation not unlike the slavery they had known just a few decades before. This revision of Southern life was generating an inevitable displacement of Black people from farms and rural life to the cities. Once in the urban environment the social and economic isolation of segregation, as well as aggressive policing which Dr. DuBois notes in the South was initiated for the purpose of keeping slaves under control, seemed designed to further oppress.
It was not only White America preventing African American advancement. Dr. DuBois begins The Souls of Black Folk with his critique of the trajectories for Black America pioneered by Marcus Garvey (complete separatism even to the extent of relocation to Africa) and Booker T. Washington (capitulation with the unequal systems in place, so that Black people even though oppressed might at least be left alone to make a living). He would coin the term "talented tenth" to reinforce his own demands for rights and opportunity and dignity for African Americans. "Talented tenth" referred to the educated African Americans at the time of his writing rising to prominence, especially in Northern states, who could serve through example and the respect that they would earn in the wider society, to forge paths for others to enter mainstream America and reverse the downturn of the South.
At the W. E. B. DuBois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture in Accra, there was put in my hands a book that seemed to me to summarize in its title the mentality that I was formulating through my two weeks in Ghana - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1972, although my edition was published by Panaf Press of Abuja, Nigeria, in 2009). Prof. Rodney was a Guyanan revolutionary intellectual and author convinced of the importance of Socialism's rise for the salvation of what has come to be known as the Developing World. Only, he called it "the underdeveloped world" because of his impression that European colonialism had ruined Africa's opportunities for development. Europe (including the United States) demanded cheap raw materials from colonies or former colonies while selling to them manufactured goods made from the same raw materials. The value of the manufactured goods would so outdistance the low cost of the materials that Africa was left in an endless cycle of debt and poverty.
Former Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings repeated this complaint throughout his term of office and continues to rail against the disadvantages that Capitalism has placed upon Ghana and other former colonies. I note that, every time an "underdeveloped" country has attempted to consolidate its industrial base by nationalizing or called for a single party system in order to prevent outright political chaos, the West has cried, "Totalitarianism!" or "Communism!" and even imposed economic sanctions in order to prevent tyranny. The effective result has also been to support global businesses and networks (capitalists) already unfairly exploiting depressed African economies.
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| Walter Rodney |
The government of Guyana, a South American/Caribbean British post-colony, saw in Prof. Rodney a persuasive dissident who was having growing influence on not only his students but large swaths of Guyana's impoverished people. It therefore sought to silence his voice in 1980 by assassinating him with a car bomb. Two of the author's friends and colleagues from the United States, who had tried to convince him not to return to his home country, introduce Prof. Rodney's life and thought in the foreword of the book by relating the circumstances of the end of his life. Despite the Guyanan government's effort to silence Walter Rodney, given evidence by the fact that the edition I purchased of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was published by a Nigerian publisher in 2009, his words continue to resonate.
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| Frantz Fanon |
Walter Rodney mentions other revolutionary authors of his time with whom he corresponded and by whom he was influenced. He cites Frantz Fanon in particular, a psychologist born in Martinique but crucial to the advancement of the Algerian revolution through the 1960s and 70s. This has prompted me to check out an English translation of Fanon's Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), 1961. It details especially the deleterious psychological effect of colonialism on the colonized and the warping of the psyche of colonizers. Fanon concludes that violence, as in the case of the Algerian revolution, is inevitable for the effective overthrow of colonial power. The book is introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre, a friend and devotee of Fanon's and a longtime advocate for Algerian independence from France.
Fanon would influence such other revolutionaries as Malcolm X, Steve Biko, and Che Guevara. He also would participate in the armed rebellion against the French in Algeria and Morocco. Frantz Fanon only lived to the age of 36 (Walter Rodney also was 38 when he was murdered). One might assume that he had died in a battle or at the hands of some undercover operative. In fact, he died of leukemia at a National Institutes of Health facility in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1961.
The book I am reading currently is New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America by Wendy Warren (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2016). This Princeton University history professor has built her reputation on her in depth and insightful study of the 500-year history of chattel slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean.
No one's hands were clean in this, not even the Puritans of New England who were some of the earliest to outlaw the practice of slavery. Although 1638 is recognized as the year of the arrival of the first African slaves to the British colonies in North America, the production of sugar cane and tobacco on the land of English possessions in the Caribbean and the commonplace of household slaves had already made chattel slavery (the practice of not only an individual as another's property but that person's offspring as well, all of whom could be sold at will by the owner) a part of everyday life throughout the Western world.
Further complicating matters was the common decision of New Englanders not to keep captive their Native American prisoners of war but to enslave them, almost always transporting them away from their homeland to foreign buyers. Dr. Warren points out that Squanto, who assisted the Pilgrims through their first winter and showed them native farming techniques, was able to speak English so fluently because he had been spirited away as a young man to England by a merchant who had induced him and about a half dozen other young men of his village to board a ship, then hoisted anchor before they knew what was happening. Squanto and the others were sold as slaves in England, but he managed to escape and found someone sympathetic to return him home. Back in America, he found his village wiped out by a European illness and the only people who would receive him the colonists of Plymouth. (That's how very early an effect slavery had on the development of New England Congregationalist society!)
Dr. Warren addresses throughout the book just how very much chattel slavery had already permeated the daily life of early America and, literally, the world. She offers a powerful sense of why the inequities and inequalities of our society have proved to be so unshakable.
Prayer by W. E. B. DuBois, epilogue to The Souls of Black Folk:
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. (Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare.) Thus in thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed
The End.
Read all my Sabbatical 2017 postings.
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